Tracking and organizing a personal schedule has become an important and sometimes intractable problem for professional level workers in modem economies. Tasks in today's workplace arrive in the form of electronic meeting invitations, to-do items, personal appointments, notes from management and colleagues, and so forth. In response, personal organizational tools such as Lotus® Notes® and Microsoft® Outlook have arisen.
Although these tools are quite useful and helpful, they present a number of disjointed views of the workday. For example, such a tool may have an electronic calendar for appointments and meetings, and a to-do list for work items that need to be completed by specified dates. The separateness of these views makes keeping track of overall work commitment problematic.
A problem frequently arises when meetings are called and scheduled electronically, in that a meeting requires not only its scheduled time, but may also require time for preparatory work that must be completed before the meeting convenes. Such preparatory time is not accounted for by the user's calendar or to-do list when meetings are scheduled electronically.
This omission may result in meetings that have attendees who overbook their days and are therefore unable to prepare adequately, or to overstressed attendees who work long into the night preparing for meetings at the last minute without adequate notice from their personal organizational tools. Thus, there is a need for improved personal organizational tools that estimate, track, and schedule work commitments that are implicitly or explicitly associated with electronic meeting invitations, but which are not accounted for by today's productivity aids.